The advantage of bi-phase encoding is that every pulse is either half a bit long or one bit long, so it is self-clocking; i.e. so long as the clock used to transmit and the clock used to receive are both reasonably constant, the receiver will never lose track of how many bit-periods (or, to be more specific, half-bit-periods) have elapsed since the beginning of the message. NRZ (Non-Return to Zero) encoding is not self-clocking; therefore, without bit stuffing or framing or some other mechanism, the resolution and accuracy of the receiver's clock may accumulate an error of greater than 1 bit period if the signal is unchanging for too long (imagine trying to guess whether a long beep is 100 seconds long or 101 seconds long). The disadvantage of a self-clocking signal is that it requires more bandwidth than NRZ.

The most obvious form of BiPhase encoding is fully-coherent bi-phase encoding, a.k.a. Manchester encoding. Fully-coherent (or fully coherent) means that the value of the underlying message corresponds directly with the (absolute) value of the signal; a bit '0' is represented by 'LH', and a bit 1 is represented by 'HL' (unless you ask someone from the other half, who will tell you that '0' is 'HL' and '1' is 'LH'). For example:

A less obvious, but sometimes more useful, form of BiPhase is differentially-coherent bi-phase (sometimes called differential bi-phase, sometimes even just called bi-phase by people who don't realise Manchester encoding is also a form of bi-phase). Differentially coherent means that the value of the message corresponds to changes in the value of the signal. In this scheme, a '0' is represented by a cycle with the same phase as the previous cycle, and a '1' is represented by a cycle with the phase opposite from the previous cycle. (Again, if you talk to some others, they will tell you that a '0' corresponds to a phase change and a '1' corresponds to no phase change. Change on '1' has a mathematicalnicety in that converting between fully-coherent and differentially-coherent is identical to changing between binary and gray code.) Differential bi-phase is often described in different terms; one may say that there is an edge (or a transition) in the middle of every bit, and an additional edge at the beginning of a '0' bit; or, there's an edge in the middle of every bit and an edge at the end of a '0' bit; or, there's an edge between every pair of bits and an edge in the middle of a '0' bit. All of these descriptions are equivalent, with the exception of the details of the very first and/or very last bits being transmitted; in RFID, commonly a message is transmitted again and again back-to-back; so even this detail is not significant. The same data in the above example looks rather different (this diagram assumes the signal is at H before the bit sequence shown):

A comparison of the two signals is worthwhile. For the fully-coherent signal, a regular square wave with a period equal to the bit period appears whenever a long string of '0's or a long string of '1's appears. A regular square wave with a period equal to twice the bit period appears whenever the bits are alternating. By contrast, in the differentially-coherent signal, a regular square wave with a period equal to the bit period only appears where there is a string of '0's, and a regular square wave with a period of twice the bit period appears when there is a string of '1's. Note that a message transmitted as fully-coherent bi-phase is physicallyindistinguishable from a message transmitted as differentially-coherent bi-phase. The '-coherent' part of the encoding is all about the interpretation of signals, not about the shape of the signals.